Earlier this month we posted about business cards and how they would never die. That started a lot of conversations and people messaging me saying that they either love them or hate them.

With all the technology out there and having a smart phone with us 24/7, there are countless apps that have tried to replace the business card, from scanning apps to the simple contact app in our phones. BlackBerry phones have a business card scanner built right into the camera app that takes the data from a business card and stores it as a new contact.

Some will say that using these apps are a lot more environmentally friendly, and I do understand that. However, for me personally there is nothing like going to a networking event and exchanging a physical card and shaking someone’s hand.

All the networking events I have been to, I have kept every card and have them all sorted for easy access when I do need them as well as I use the BlackBerry camera app to add the card as a contact in my phone.

Our good friend Nichole over at AIM Social Media Marketing gave us the idea when we redesigned our card to add a picture to the front of the card. This is so when you look at your cards you have collected from a night of networking, you will be able to easily remember who that card belongs to.

With networking in mind, will you be bringing a physical business card to our BlackBerry Meetup and Networking event on November 20^th or will you be using an app on your phone?

Let’s have a discussion on how you feel about business cards over on our Facebook Page.

Be sure to RSVP to our Open Networking event and BlackBerryMeetup on November 20^th at Chapter Two Brewery!

As a social media manager there is always so much going on and I’m always looking for new ways to stay productive. We not only have to worry about our own platforms and must make sure we are keeping up with the latest social media trends, we have to do this for all of our clients as well.

For those that have team in place that’s not as hard to manage, however for those social media managers that are doing it on their own you need to have systems in place and tools that will help you stay organized.

One of the tools I use, and this is by far my most used app, is ToDoist. Now, you might be wondering why I’m talking about a To Do List App. I know there are thousands out there and as you know I LOVE my BlackBerry and all of their apps but ToDoist just stands out from the rest!

With ToDoist you can create projects to help sort your tasks. For example, I have a project for “Content” and in this project I have sub projects for each of my clients. This is an easy way for me to separate what client needs what task completed when I add a new task. I also have a task for “Chores”. Now no one likes to do the dishes or the laundry, but they are things that need to be done, so I have reoccurring tasks for those as well.

Now, as I just mentioned a lot of tasks must be done daily, weekly and even monthly. One of my favorite things about ToDoist is you can create a task that reoccurs. You can have it reoccur daily, weekly or monthly depending on what you need.

When in the office, some people like to have their phones out of reach to help them stay productive. How will this app help them if they can’t check things off and see what needs to be done if they don’t want to have the distraction of their phone near them?

Well the great thing about ToDoist is that it’s not only an app on your phone but an app on your laptop, you can have it open as a tab in your browser, an extension in Chrome or even an extension in your Gmail. With the paid version of ToDoist you can have you email synced with the app to help stay even more productive. I will mention though, the free version is MORE then enough to stay productive.

What are you waiting for?? Have a look at this amazing app and try it for yourself! Trust me, you will become far more productive once you start using it.

What to know more about the app? Click this button below!

When I started Russtek a little over a year ago, it was because I loved social media and wanted to help others and help their businesses grow. Building websites was never something I even thought about.

When starting out I knew I needed a website and I had no idea how to go about designing my own site, so I went out and got a few quotes for others to build one for me. When the quotes came in my jaw hit the floor! I couldn’t believe what it was going to cost me. As a startup I wasn’t willing to pay that much so it was time to start learning.

After a lot of learning and a few variations I have a website I am proud of!!!

Over the past few years I have never really promoted the fact that we build websites but through word of mouth we have done several sites for clients and others that we know. It’s something that I love doing but still not something we promoted much.

After talking with a client that I have built a site for, they have told me this is something that I should be doing more of. The more I learn and the more I play, the more I love building websites, so it was time to finally change that. It’s now something that we “officially” offer as a service from Russtek.

Thinking about that now, it’s something I should have never held back on but it’s also a lesson I have learnt. Never hold back on something you’re passionate about. If it’s something you’re good at and something you want to do…just do it!

What to talk about us building your new site for a much cheaper rate than I got? Click the button below!

Let’s Chat

It’s no secret that I am a huge fan of BlackBerry and have been since about 2010. After using a Palm webOS phone that was no longer supported by that company, I asked the question on Twitter, “With Palm no longer supporting webOS, what phone should I get next?”

The power or social media is incredible and the response was amazing! So many people tweeted back telling me why I should go to an Android phone or to use an iPhone. Out of all the tweets I got only one person recommended BlackBerry. Not only did he recommend going to BlackBerry, he shipped me a Bold 9900 for free. “How about BlackBerry? If you’re interested I will send you a Bold 9900”.

How could I turn that down? At the time that was a high-end BlackBerry device and it was mostly used by business professionals. Since then however, BlackBerry started to lose sales as the iPhone started to dominate the market for both consumers and professionals.

Since my Bold 9900 I have stayed with BlackBerry and have become a true fan. From the Bold 9900, to the Z10, to the Passport then finally leaving BB10 and going to the Dtek60 running Android to now using the BlackBerry KEYᵒⁿᵉ.

It’s no secret I use a BlackBerry and I often brag about my KEYᵒⁿᵉ, but the best part about the device is when I’m at a meeting or a networking event. People see the phone and it’s an instant conversation starter. The first question I always get, “Is that a BlackBerry?”. Right away I have their attention and we can start to connect.

Let’s go back to talking about networking events. Early this year when the KEYᵒⁿᵉ came out we hosted a BlackBerry Meetup and Networking event that was a huge success. Now that the KEY2 has launched we have once again teamed up with the great people at BlackBerry and plan to host another event. This is an open event for anyone to attend but it’s also a BlackBerry Meetup for us die hard BlackBerry fans.

Want to know more? Click the button below!

BlackBerry Meetup

As an entrepreneur it can sometimes be a struggle to get motivated and tackle your To Do List. Not everyone can be like Gary Vaynerchuck and have that 24/7 hustle. Well, I can’t that’s for sure. The older I get I have realized my time has become more valuable.

I have always been a very positive and motivated person, but I am not perfect by any means. For me the best way to stay motivated is to stick to a schedule.

If you have been reading our blog, I posted a blog back on April 17^th of this year talking about what my day looked like from the time I woke up to the time I went to bed.

I still stick to this schedule…for the most part, and for me that’s one thing that helps me stay focused and motivated. Sticking to a schedule however, isn’t the only thing that helps me.

If you have followed me for any amount of time, you have heard me talk about ToDoist. This is an app for your phone, computer and an extension for your browser. You can create tasks, reoccurring tasks, projects and so much more. This is a To Do list on steroids.

Seeing on every device that I have tasks that need to be completed is pure motivation for me.

What keeps you motivated?

Head to our Facebook Page and Let’s Chat about what keeps you motivated!

Let’s Chat

Our last blog was way back on August 21^st…it’s now October! So why did we take a break from blogging?

Writing this blog is something we love doing, it’s a space where we hope to teach you at least something small that will help you on your journey no matter if it’s being an entrepreneur or about social media for your business.

So what’s the reason for being gone an entire month without a single blog post? That’s because we were working on something big and between our client work and Russtek Media work it was a challenge to get this project finished.

We are happy to say, that the project has now been completed and ready for the world!!!

What is this big project we were working on? Our brand-new website and new services that we are going to offer!!!!

First thing, head on over to our new website and let us know what you think! You can click right here on our name, Russtek Media and it will take you to our site!

What’s new about the site?

Well for starters we redesigned it to make it look a little better and have a lot more functionality. Not to mention, there are a few things that are there but running in the background. That’s something for a later date. You won’t want to miss that when it’s ready to be announced!!!

Why the new services?

We wanted to keep things simple for you. Don’t get me wrong, we still offer a wide range of services outside of what’s mentioned on our website but that’s something we can connect and chat about later.

We are going to focus on 4 major services that will all be listed on our site, of course our main service will be Social Media Management. That’s something we love doing and the reason we started Russtek Media!

We also now offer Social Media Audits that will help you determine where you can improve your efforts as well as showcase the areas where you are thriving with your social media!

We will also offer a Consultation service. Not everyone wants to hire a social media manager for their company and that’s where we can come in and help by consulting.

Finally, we are always available for public speaking engagements as well as teaching. We can come to you and speak at your event on a wide range of topics or have more of a classroom setting and teach your staff or business on any topic or platform from social media dos and don’ts to building a simple website for your business.

As always we love feed back from our followers so head on over to our Facebook page and let us know what you think of our new website?

Let’s Chat!

One of my favorite things to do as an entrepreneur and small business owner is to get out and network. When building a business, it’s very easy to get lost when connecting with people on LinkedIn through other social media networks but there is nothing better than meeting another business owner in person.

You’re there to meet people!

When you’re out networking your doing just that, meeting new people. It’s not the time to start selling your product or service.

When you’re at a networking event, introduce yourself and try and focus your attention on what your new friend does and who they are. They will want to know about you as well, but I like to get to know my new contact first then start to talk about myself.

After you have both chatted about each other and got to know what you each do, shake hands and then it’s time to move on and meet the next person.

All to often at networking events, people will get comfortable with friends they see or a friend they came with and just sit and talk to them all night waiting for people to come to them.

What’s wrong with this?

This one is obvious, you limit the amount of connections you could make by talking with people you’re comfortable with. This was something that took me a bit to get used to as it was a bit out of my comfort zone. As the quote goes, “A comfort zone is a beautiful place, but nothing grows there”. The next time you head to a networking event, keep that quote in mind and it just might help you like it did me.

This next one is something I can say with absolute certainty, you should NEVER do!

At a networking event I attended recently, I noticed business cards left all over the room on tables, stuck in picture frames and anywhere people would see them easily. So why is this a bad thing? It’s bad for many reasons but let’s look at this one reason, Who is the person behind the cards? You don’t know, do you? Not to mention that it’s a very pushy way to try and get peoples business.

For me personally, if I see that, the chances of me doing business with that person are very slim. As well, along those lines if you burst into a group of people, hand out your cards and then move on. That as well is something I would say to never do. Like leaving the cards, it’s very pushy and you have no idea who the person is.

With all of that said, what do you think about these examples of bad networking habits? Do you agree? If you have anything to add, I would love to hear your thoughts. Let’s have a conversation over on our Facebook Page in the comments!

Let’s Chat

Nick Russell

nick.russell@russtekmedia.com

519.792.9303

Let us help manage your social media! Book your FREE consultation now!!!

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“If you want to go fast, go alone! If you want to go far, go together!!!”

How many of your saw our Motivation Monday post yesterday? What did you think about that?

More often I keep seeing post about me vs the world and I really don’t understand the thought process behind that. There is a saying from across the river in Detroit…Detroit vs Everyone, it was even a song by the rapper Eminem. For many years Detroit was a horrible place to live, no businesses wanted to move there, the crime rate was up, and it was in a huge decline.

That’s all changed because people started to work together to make that city great again. The same thing can happen in business. It’s no secret I’m part of an online community called Social Media united. This is a group of people and an online course all started by Rachel Pedersen and if it wasn’t for SMU, I would not be where I am today.

I will leave you with that, do you want to go fast and go alone? Getting to the top quickly and not having anything that will stand the test of time or do you want to go far and work together? Building a team of people that are as motivated as you are to help push you, teach you and move each other further in business.

What are your thoughts?

Let’s Chat

Nick Russell

nick.russell@russtekmedia.com

519.792.9303

Let us help manage your social media! Book your FREE consultation now!!!

BOOK NOW!!!

Being an entrepreneur and a social media manager, celebrating your wins, no matter how big or how small is huge!

Most of you know that I’m apart of a group of Social Media Managers run by Rachel Pedersen, called Social Media United. On top of being in this group I’m also apart of another group that’s run by AIM Social Media Marketing. In both groups, we have what’s called “Wins Wednesday”. In there we post our wins, no matter how big or how small.

The benefit to this, is that we get to celebrate our wins and accomplishments!

Why is this so important?

No matter what you’re doing or what field you are in, working hard none stop can get to you. Celebrating a win and hearing feed back from others is a HUGE motivation. Just think back to when you were a child on a sports team, when your coach gave you a pat on the back, how great did that feel? Did you want to play harder and win for your coach? Of course you did!

The same thing applies at work now that we are adults. Getting a small pat on the back is a great way to motivate us. I love reading through the comments on these posts in the groups and seeing the great things people are doing. There is nothing more satisfying than telling someone that they did a great job and hearing how much they appreciate that.

As you scroll through your social feeds this week and see a post about something awesome someone did, make sure to comment “Great job”. That comment will go a long way, and trust me, that comment will motivate that person even more!

What are your thoughts on this? Do you agree?

Let’s Chat

Nick Russell

nick.russell@russtekmedia.com

519.792.9303

Some of you may have attended our Techboost workshops put on by Hackforge Windsor about Building a Simple Website for Small Businesses in WordPress. If you have, you know that I talk about some of the plugins that we use on our site.

In our workshop we touch on just a couple but our friends at Gretathemes have let us share this great article with you that touches on a few more that are great for your site. Take a look at what they have to say!

If you are looking to start a website, WordPress is probably is the best website builder out there. The amazing plugins and themes furnished by the WordPress repository make it a highly popular Content Management System. The icing on the cake; WordPress powers up to 30 percent of all the websites over the Internet.

Before you start building your website, make it a point to analyze the requirements of your website. By that, we mean to say that you need to be aware of the functions that will be served by it such as the audience it caters to, the features expected by them, its speed issues, steps for optimization etc.

So, if you are planning to start your own WordPress website, here are the top 10 plugins that you must have for a smooth and wholesome WordPress experience.

Yoast SEO

Search Engine Optimization makes your website visible to the Internet world. It is an imperative measure to help your target audience find you. To get started with your site’s SEO, you must have the Yoast SEO Plugin which is touted to be the best WordPress SEO plugin with over 5+ million active installations.

You will be able to supercharge your site’s content by exercising SEO instructions offered by the plugin through its content & SEO analysis. The premium version of the plugin gives you 1 year of free access to their support team. Also, you will be able to expand the Yoast SEO with the News SEO, Video SEO, Local SEO and WooCommerce SEO extensions with the premium version.

The Yoast SEO plugin is truly an effective and powerful SEO tool. It offers a huge scale of functions that make it a plugin for all.

Akismet Anti-Spam Plugin

If you are starting a new blog and are not already aware, Spam is a huge problem for websites and blogs around the world. Apart from being generally irritating, Spam contributes to cluttering your site’s database, making your site look unreliable, or just messing up the site’s SEO with user-generated Spam. However, WordPress offers an anti-Spam plugin that checks your site for Spam and eliminates it.

The Akismet Anti-Spam plugin checks the comments and contact form submissions on your WordPress website, filters out the Spam, and deletes them. A rather intelligent Spam combat plugin, it also lets you manually review comments and flag them as Spam/Not Spam. It speeds your website by clearing the disk space and offers a paid version for business users.

JetPack

Brought to WordPress users by Automattic, the JetPack plugin is a must-have for all WordPress websites. It powers your site’s design, takes care of the marketing aspect, and even enhance the site security.

JetPack really has tons of wonderful features to offer such as powerful customization tools, a high-speed CDN, Lazy image loading, Site stats and analytics, Brute force attack protection, spam filtering, downtime monitoring and a lot more. It even offers the option of data backup, secure login, and priority support from WordPress experts.

This plugin is meant to help you tackle your site from the very beginning to the finish. You can also take care of your site’s marketing efforts as the plugin offers automated scheduling and social media posting, best of advertising programs, etc.

It’s worth to mention that all of our premium WordPress themes are fully compatible with Jetpack.

W3 Total Cache

Implementing Caching on your WordPress site has a benefit for both your site’s SEO as well as the User Experience. It enhances your website’s performance, reduces server lag, and with a Content Delivery Network (CDN) in place, it also reduces download times.

If you are looking for a website with features mentioned above, you must install the W3 Total Cache WordPress plugin. When fully configured, the plugin claims to bring about at least 10x improvement in your site’s overall site performance. It also accelerates the loading time in repeated viewing on the browser’s end so that your visitors don’t have to wait up an extra second to access your website. It also saves up to 80% bandwidth via minification and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and feeds.

Overall a wonderful Caching plugin, the W3 Total Cache also comes with AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and SSL support.

Also, when it comes to performance and speed, minimal WordPress themes are something you should consider to user for your WordPress website. They’re not bloated, lightweight and fast. The combination of minimal WordPress themes and a good performance plugin like W3 Total Cache result really fast website that your users are going to love!

WordFence Security

Your site’s security must be a prioritized task while you are setting up your site. Not an issue to be compromised with, ensuring robust site measures helps you protect your website from unsolicited security mishaps.

To keep the site’s security worries at bay, the WordFence security plugin must be your go-to choice. Its Malware scanning feature scans several points on your website such as core files, SEO spam, themes and plugins, backdoors, code injections and malicious redirects that might affect your site’s integrity.

The plugin’s security tools are designed to help you monitor site visits and any hacking attempts, in real time. This information furnishes the time and day, the origin and the IP address of the visitor/hacker.

With its premium version, you can expect a lot more: Two-factor authentication, an advanced comment spam filter, Country blocking etc.

Even if you review website builders available in the market and assess their security arrangement tools, you will find that WordFence plugin for WordPress is really a great one. Hence, if you are looking for a great site security plugin for your WordPress site, you must go ahead with WordFence security.

WP Smush

While we optimize our site’s content for a better SEO reach, we always underestimate image optimization and the benefits it can provide. However, if you are using the Smush Image Compression plugin, you are tapping that as well. This free plugin works to resize, optimize, and compress the images on your WordPress site to makes it fast to load and cut the slack.

WP Optimize

The fact that the WP Optimize plugin features over 700,000+ active installs is enough to pay attention to the need of optimization and cleaning the site’s database.

When in place, the WP Optimize plugin runs an automatic and scheduled clean-up as per the time set by you. It removes unnecessary post revisions to make space and can perform optimizations without the need for running manual queries. A powerful optimization plugin, every WordPress website must install and run this plugin to make their site run efficiently.

Broken Link Checker

A rather simple plugin, the Broken Link Checker plugin does what it says. It scans your site’s content for any broken links that are no longer working, any missing images, or redirects. It then notifies about them to you via email. Having this plugin is essential because you wouldn’t want your site visitors to come across a dead link and ruin their user experience.

Sassy Social Share

As important as other site functions, always ensure that your website and its content are well marketed for the audience to find and go through. With Social sharing plugins in place, you can take care of announcing your latest site updates for your followers and also enhance your site’s SEO.

The Sassy Social Share plugin lets you share your site’s content over 100 more social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Whatsapp, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Reddit. Its aesthetic looking social sharing icons make sure that they stand out for your visitors to see. It even lets you put your share counts on display.

It does not need a user registration to get started. Its responsive icons are good to look at even on the mobile devices. The lightweight code of the plugin makes the icons quick to load. The best thing about this plugin: it’s absolutely free!

Conclusion

The above-mentioned plugins are a must have as they take of your site’s security, speed, optimization, social sharing and a lot more. Having these plugin saves you the cost and effort off many manual tasks that could otherwise be daunting. All-in-all, every WordPress website must exploit the features of these top 10 must have WordPress plugins to ensure that their site keeps running efficiently.

If you like what you just read, make sure you check them out in the link I have included to their website. If you need help with your site, we are here to help as well!

Let’s Chat

Nick Russell

nick.russell@russtekmedia.com

519.792.9303